I just had to email me a file I got sent to my phone and I feel unable to accept this as the better solution.
What you do guys use for inter-device communication?
KDE Connect
Syncthing for everything: file transfers, backing up phone photos, synced obsidian vaults, etc.
I either use KDE Connect or Pairdrop depending on which devices I am sharing befween
Localsend
For sending files between a phone and a PC, I use KDE Connect.
For sending files between PCs, I use SSH.
Both are really simple and lightweight tools that normally come preinstalled, and you can use them with no configuration.
Adding to this, there’s a gnome extension so you can use KDE connect without KDE DE.
You can use KDE Connect itself without KDE.
But GSConnect shows up in the equivalent of your task bar
So does KDE Connect. It’s a standalone program that happens to also be integrated into the KDE DE.
No, not on GNOME Desktops, that’s the reason you need to install GSConnect on GNOME. If you install just KDE Connect on a GNOME system, you will not have it integrated.
Ohhhhhhhhhh
Man I need to read better
Better late than never mate ;D
PC to phone:
- USB cable
- KDE Connect
- Nextcloud
- Syncthing
PC to PC:
- USB drive
- SFTP
- SSH
- Nextcloud
- Syncthing
Phone to PC:
- USB cable
- KDE Connect
- Nextcloud
- Syncthing
KDE Connect can do all three of these.
KDE Connect and SyncThing
yes clipboard sharing and single file transfer is with KDE connect king
and Keepass and obsidian an photos with syncthing
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage SMB Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access
[Thread #1 for this comm, first seen 5th Jun 2026, 07:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
good bot
- syncthing (file synchronization)
- kdeconnect (file transfers, clipboard sharing, presentation remote)
- deskflow (keyboard and mouse sharing)
- warpinator (one off file sharing)
- rsync / scp (one off file copies / backups)
There’s PairDrop, you can self host it but iirc it transfer via webrtc so as long as the devices ‘see’ one another there’s no mitm.
This is based on Snapdrop. If the current developer hasn’t gone crazy with the fork, you can read the entire source code over a cup of coffee. The server used to just handle discovery/handshake of devices on the same network, with file transfer peer to peer using local addresses.
Edit: Looks like they’ve added transfer over WAN not just local. Privacy discussion here.
Nextcloud
LocalSend on both devices is something I’ve used
I always have SSH everywhere on everything and I could never understand why anyone ever would want to make it more complicated than that.
Most people probably don’t care but it can be a security risk, allowing malware to move “laterally” between all your devices. For my main devices I don’t give them SSH access to each other, but I do give them SSH access to my secondary devices (like a Pi-Hole)
[…] it can be a security risk, allowing malware to move “laterally” between all your devices.
Unless you do something incredibly stupid, such as allowing keyless login or sharing keys (or having unencrypted keys or keys without a passphrase, seriously), I find it hard to see how that would actually happen in practice.
Even if you have a password for your ssh key, malware on your system can just wait until you enter the password.
My point is that SSH access is very powerful, and effectively means that the security of the SSH server is reduced to the security of the SSH client. If your SSH client is pwned, so is your server. If you have 10 devices each with ssh access to each other, then if any one device is pwned, all devices are pwned as well.
This is not the case for systems designed for file sharing only. For example with syncthing, if one device gets pwned, all it can do is send files to the other devices.
Even if you have a password for your ssh key, malware on your system can just wait until you enter the password.
Sure, it’s just that from my point-of-view I’d be toast anyway if anyone managed to gain that level of access.
Depending on the number of devices you have, your threat model, it can be helpful to set up a security hierarchy. So you only need to worry about securing the devices at the top of the hierarchy, and can play loose and careless with the devices lower down. That way it’s less likely to lose everything due to one mistake
